


The Right to Remember

by coconutfred



Category: Jupiter Ascending (2015)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-11
Updated: 2015-12-11
Packaged: 2018-05-06 03:06:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5400731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coconutfred/pseuds/coconutfred
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Trauma should leave scars. </p><p>[Jupiter has a decision to make once she gets home.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Right to Remember

After she inherits the Earth, and then saves the Earth, Jupiter goes home. The Aegis move her family back into their house and repair the damage mostly without supervision. Once, someone asks her to explain how the pull out couch works. Another time, she is called on to verify the picture placement in the hallway. Besides that, though, they leave her alone to clutch Caine's hand and set up dates to go visit Stinger. When they're done, the boys show the Aegis out, and Jupiter is alone again with her sleeping family and her house like nothing ever hurt it.

She goes upstairs, falls into bed, and sleeps.

She is awoken only two hours later by her mother's desperate hands on her shoulders, pressing into deep bruises and startling her awake. Jupiter shouts before she remembers that she's safe here, and between that and her mother's voice, high pitched and anxious, she hears the others begin to shift.

"Jupiter, my baby, you're alive. Thank heavens, there were monsters and demons, are you hurt, are you okay-"

Vladdie rushes into the room, wild eyes, and when he sees Jupiter sitting half up in bed, he bursts into tears.

It takes things a long time to calm down.

-

Jupiter doesn't know how to explain. Her family remembers monsters and threats and a faint hint of destruction and pain and weightlessness. More than anything else, they remember being helpless in the hands of things that want to hurt them. Jupiter has never seen her mother or aunt helpless, doesn't know how to parse the images of her uncle before and her uncle now. It leaves a crawling in her gut and a sick taste in the back of her throat.

She feels like maybe she should have hit Balem with the pipe a few more times.

It doesn't help that her mother remembers the living room as destroyed, and yet, the Aegis didn't leave so much as a scuff mark. When they were repairing things, Jupiter thought it would be good, to come back to normalcy and calm. Instead, it just confuses her family. She tries to explain, over and over, but even though they nod and respond like they understand, she can tell that her family doesn't feel that it's real.

She remembers waking up in her clothes after the clinic and having that moment of unreality - is it real, is it true, did that just- the moment of worry when she thought she couldn't trust herself, and then she saw the gun and Caine and she had proof. 

Her family just has her, and that's not proof enough, not for this.

Trauma should leave scars, but even her bruises are already gone.

-

Her mother calls Jupiter "Max" one day when Jupiter wakes her from her nap after work, and looks confused when Jupiter flinches.

Jupiter calls Stinger.

It is not a helpful conversation.

"There's a lot of bureaucracy involved in showing people our society before they're ready to join it," he says, and

"They'll just pass it off as a bad dream in time," and 

"Trust me, most people don't want proof."

Jupiter doesn't bother asking him about her own nightmares or the shaky feeling she gets every time she sees a building she knows was destroyed. She thinks about how her uncle installed trackers on all the cars and started making them check in every hour. She thinks about how her mother slips farther and farther away, reliving the break in where her father died like it was yesterday instead of before Jupiter was born. She thinks about how Vladdie has gotten withdrawn and quiet, stopped eating, stopped looking at himself in the mirror.

She thinks, Trauma should leave scars.

She asks, "If I can't explain, can I make them forget?"

-

Later, she is skating through the air and Caine is flying behind and thirty feet above her, and Jupiter lets herself crash into the top of the Aon Center. 

The last time she saw it, the center was on fire and missing the last three stories, but now it is whole, down to the gravel spread on the roof. She rips up her jeans landing on it and ends up with road rash all down her leg. Caine is beside himself, and she lets him clean the wound but flat out refuses the healing spray.

She looks down at the bloody gravel and feels a curl of satisfaction replace the unease in her chest. Both she and the Aon Center are going to come away marked from _this_ brush with the alien.

When her mother clucks over it later and Vladdie dramatically threatens to skin Caine, and her aunts and uncle argue about which home remedy is best, Jupiter looks at her new telescope and feels safe.


End file.
